From then to now
A weekly review of sorts
To move myself back into posting more regularly, I've decided to try to make it a practice to on either Sunday or Monday post a few items related to some things that over the previous week struck me and which seemed not to generate a lot of response. Wish me luck.
BTW, in all cases you are strongly encouraged to check out the original article.
-
AND ANOTHER THING
When I was posting regularly all that time ago, that was always my headline for any science-related items I found interesting. Which is how we’re going to start this new effort. This one comes from Smithsonian magazine, which brings news of evolution occurring in real time - in this case, about ten generations.
The study involved was published in the May 21 edition of Global Change Biology and related to Anna's hummingbirds (Calypte anna), a species found in California.
Simply (probably oversimply, so read the article) put, the proliferation of hummingbird feeders since World War II has provided the birds with a plentiful supply of nectar, resulting in longer, larger, beaks - the better to take advantage of the feeders - as well as enabling them to expand their range from southern California up the coast to British Columbia.
So take that, creationists: Yeah, evolution can take tens or hundreds of thousands of years, but it doesn't have to. The argument "no one has seen evolution" just won't wash. Not that it ever did.
-
SOME GOOD NEWS, AT LEAST I THINK IT IS
Okay, here we have some good news by way of Hemant Mehta, aka Friendly Atheist.
After more than a decade of work, a recently retired openly humanist member of the Delaware State House got to see his important “death with dignity” bill become law.
This was the end of a 10-year effort by the now-retired “Unitarian Universalist humanist" Paul Baumbach. It was actually passed last session only to be vetoed by Gov. John Carney. This year, with a new governor, Matt Meyer, it passed again and was signed into law.
The new law is crammed with safeguards so that this choice is available only to terminally-ill patients who are acting of their own free will and are fully aware of what they are doing. As Mehta puts it:
This was meant to be a last resort for patients with no other options available to them, not a first resort for the desperate. It’s the humane approach for people whose only path forward involves unimaginable suffering.
Delaware becomes just the tenth state with such an end-of-life law even though a recent Gallup poll showed 66-71% of Americans support allowing physician-assisted suicide.
And in fact, there's more good news on the same front. On May 27, Reuters reports, the French National Assembly approved a bill to legalize assisted dying. The bill, which has the support of President Emmanuel Macron, is expected to pass the Senate, with polls saying 90% of the public supports such laws.
France will join several other European countries along with Canada and Australia in having a right-to-die law.
I know this issue can be divisive but I have had the experience of watching someone grievously ill whose life had shrunk to just surviving suffering and who openly expressed a request to "pull the plug" have to continue to suffer to the end because this option was not available. Neither a patient nor those who care about them should have to go through that.
-
REMEMBER WHEN …
… privacy from government snooping was a significant issue? Maybe I mean definitely it should be again. Two recent stories tell us why.
In the first, 404 Media reported on May 29 that earlier that month, a Texas cop, suspecting that a woman had gotten a self-administered abortion, performed a nationwide search of more than 83,000 automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to try to find her. The search included states where abortion is legal, such as Washington and Illinois.
A company called Flock markets the cameras, usually to cities and towns to address concerns about local crime or find missing people. Instead, it has become another means for police to conduct sweeping, warrantless surveillance, enabling police in one state to "investigate what is a human right in another state because it is a crime in another,” in the words of Kate Bertash of the Digital Defense Fund.
(Sidebar: I first wrote about ALPRs in 2007 when New York City was about to install its first of them.)
The second item comes from “The Intercept,” which reported on May 22 that US intelligence agencies are evading the 4th Amendment and obtaining vast amounts of personal and sensitive information that normally would require a search warrant to obtain.
How? Simply by buying it from data brokers, a vast and growing - and largely unregulated - market.
But there's a problem: There's too much data for sale from too many sources and oh dear, the spooks can't use it efficiently. So, the article informs us,
[t]he Office of the Director of National Intelligence is working on a system to centralize and “streamline” the use of commercially available information.... The data portal will include information deemed by the ODNI as highly sensitive, that which can be “misused to cause substantial harm, embarrassment, and inconvenience to U.S. persons.”
That data will be available to the 18 separate agencies and offices that comprise the federal intelligence "community" - and perhaps others beyond those. It will also enable use of unreliable, hallucination-prone AI large-language models and pseudoscientific “sentiment analysis,” which claims being able to know someone’s opinion about a topic by analyzing implicit signals in their behavior, movement, or speech.
But don't worry, really - the spooks insist this is just about efficiency and is not any threat to First or Fourth Amendment rights. Really. They mean it this time. They do. Because efficiency in government spying on us really is all about real freedom.
Footnote: The program to establish this "Data Consortium" was started during the Biden administration.
-
SPEAK UP BEFORE YOU GET SHUT UP
Finally for this week, the article is from April, but it’s something on-going which has gotten not near enough attention even as people are kinda sorta aware of it in particular circumstances.
Specifically, we are facing a new wave of bills and lawsuits designed to limit and repress First Amendment rights to free speech and public assembly. People are aware, I expect, of moves to restrict (properly read as drive out of existence) campus protests against the genocide in Gaza and/or support of Palestinian rights. But that is not the intended end. Just like sports and bathroom bans are not the actual goal of the transphobes and transmisiacs but are just the "foot on the door," the "camel's nose," toward much more far-reaching ends, so are these laws.
“The Guardian” offered a brief rundown a few weeks ago, declaring
[a]nti-protest bills that seek to expand criminal punishments for constitutionally protected peaceful protests ... have spiked since Trump’s inauguration.
Forty-one new anti-protest bills across 22 states have been introduced since the start of the year ... according to the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL) tracker.
This year’s tally includes 32 bills across 16 states since Trump returned to the White House, with five federal bills targeting college students, anti-war protesters and climate activists with harsh prison sentences and hefty fines....
For example, the Safe and Secure Transportation of American Energy act would make it a federal felony punishable by 20 years in prison to “disrupt” planned or operational gas pipelines – without defining what constitutes "disruption," meaning it even could be applied to a lawsuit challenging a pipeline's permit. Similar bills based on model legislation crafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) already have been enacted in 22 states.
As the “Guardian” notes, social movements usually generate attempts at repression. Repressive anti-protest laws proliferated in the wake of the 2016 Standing Rock protests. Protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd resulted in 52 such laws being introduced across 35 states. One federal bill then was the Unmasking Antifa Act, potentially criminalizing wearing a mask during a protest. This March, the virtually-identical Unmasking Hamas Act would make wearing a mask or other disguise while protesting in an “intimidating” or “oppressive” way punishable by 15 years in prison - while not defining “oppressive” or “disguise.”
All of which means that protests about Gaza are not the cause; they are just the latest excuse. In the words of AJenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel at the ACLU:
“These state bills and Trump’s crackdown on protected political speech are intended to scare people away from protesting or, worse, criminalize the exercise of constitutional rights.”
And there is Jay Saper, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace, who said:
“Make no mistake, this is not about Jewish safety. This is about advancing an authoritarian agenda to clamp down on dissent.”
That is the goal.
And not just the legislatures, the courts get used as well. The latest attacks on protest also include expanding civil penalties, which can tie up activists in expensive and bankrupting litigation for years. These often take the form of a SLAPP1 (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation), used by the fossil fuel industry, wealthy individuals, and politicians to silence critics and suppress protest movements.
In Minnesota, a new bill seeks to create civil and criminal liability for funders and supporters of protesters who peacefully demonstrate on pipeline or other utility property. In Ohio, legislators are considering whether participants of noisy or disruptive but non-violent protests – as well as people and organizations who support them – could face expensive lawsuits.
Three other states – Alaska, Wisconsin, Illinois – are considering new or harsher civil penalties for protesters.
The good news here is that most of these bills fail to pass or never make it out of committee in the first place. The bad news is that any of them pass at all and any one of them can do significant damage to our right to protest.
On Monday[, April 7,] in Washington DC, a non-violent climate protester was convicted on felony charges of conspiracy against the United States and property damage for putting washable finger paint on the protective case of the Little Dancer statue in the National Gallery. Timothy Martin, who faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each count, will be sentenced in August.
Facing years in prison and huge fines for "conspiracy" and "damage" that could be undone with a wet cloth. Intimidation into utter silence. That what all this is about.
The repression of campus-based pro-peace, anti-genocide, pro-rights protests is wrong and should be resisted in the courts and legislatures and corporate headquarters and on the ground. But always bear in mind that there is a broader agenda of generalized repression and oppression behind it.
A SLAPP is a lawsuit is intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their opposition. That is, the suers don't really expect to win the suit. What they want to do is to drain their opponents either financially, emotionally, or better yet both, so the opponents are exhausted and just give up.
They were popular among corporations from the 70s to the 90s, particularly when they were leveled against individuals or "kitchen table" groups that were using regulatory proceedings and hearings to oppose some plan of some corporation. The price for dropping such suits - which were patently frivolous, as they often claimed that by criticizing the company's proposal you were by definition "defaming it" and "causing it to suffer financial loss" - the price for dropping the suits was usually dropping out of the regulatory process and letting the company's proposal proceed unopposed. These suits lost a lot of their luster when their targets who were in a position to fight them began to file what became known as SLAPP-backs, where the roles were switched and the corporation went from plaintiff to defendant.
Go here for more about SLAPP-backs.